Excellent Idea of the Day: Old Cell Phone ATM

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There are two aging LG cell phones sitting on my entryway table,
a Dare and an enV. They have been waiting there for weeks to be
picked up and tossed into a recycling bin at Best Buy, but
somehow I always forget. The ecoATM aims to influence well-meaning
but forgetful folks like me to get on the recycling ball by
offering cash for turning in a phone.

Funded through a Small Business Innovation
Research grant from the National Science Foundation,
the ecoATM is an automated system that allow consumers to turn
in obsolete phones and reimburses them with cash. The kiosk
can evaluate devices using diagnostics that can find things
like cracked screens or bleeding pixels and determine what's
an easy fix or when the device is dead. The smart database
that the ATM runs on is trained with more than 4,000 devices,
and as it inspects more of them, it gains more knowledge.

After evaluating the device, the system calculates the value by
looking through the company's real-time pre-auction system.
According to the press release, within that system, "a
broad network of buyers have already bid in advance on the
4,000 different models in eight possible grades, so the kiosk
can immediately provide compensation." The total process only
takes a few minutes.

Three-fourths of the phones collected are repurposed to second
homes, giving them to people who may not have otherwise had the
chance to use modern devices. The others are sent to recycling
centers to reclaim some materials and keep toxic ones from ever
seeing the light of a landfill.